Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

THAT WEEK, I waited for the apocalypse, for the universe to finally acknowledge the rent that had been torn in the fabric of Andret family life. But first one day, a partly cloudy one and mild, then the next, sunny and humid, floated peaceably by. My mother cleaned up the mess. We ate breakfast. We ate lunch. We ate dinner. We spoke, though somewhat cautiously, when we passed one another on the paths. In the daytime, Mom went back to working on the clearing. Dad went off to his shed.

Today was Saturday, finally, and my father was washing the hallway rug in the lake. It seemed to me that this was his first acknowledgment, in any form, of what had happened. Mom and I were sitting together on the porch, watching him. From the end of the dock, he dipped it into the water, then lifted it, spread it onto the boards, and squeezed a bottle of soap over it.

I couldn’t imagine him ever apologizing: but this was close.

“Those things,” my mother said suddenly. “Those things I said. I want you to know that you had nothing to do with any of them. What I said about why I’m still here with your dad, for example. You must know how upset I was.”

“I do know, Mom.”

“I wish I’d never uttered a word of any of it. I wish none of us had.”

“I know that, too.”

“Of course you do. We were all crazy up there for a few minutes.” She set down her mug. “Except for you, I suppose. You kept your head better than the rest of us. Thank you for that.”

“You’re welcome. I guess.”

We turned to watch him again. He was leaning over the fabric, kneading the soap into foam, his fingers picking out what must have been the last bits of plaster in the weave.

“I think he’s a little better now,” she said. “I think he might be back to normal.”

I lifted my head and looked over the cove.

“What’s the matter?”

“ Normal people don’t swing crowbars at their wives,” I said.

“He wasn’t swinging at me.”

“Then who was he swinging at?”

She looked down at him, then up at the woods. “He was swinging at that, ” she said. She pointed. “At whatever’s going on in that shed up there.”

“Well, normal men don’t rip holes in their houses either, just because a proof isn’t going perfectly.” I pointed the other way, behind us at the cabin, where a man from the hardware store had nailed up a sheet of plywood the day before. “Or because they decide a job offer is some kind of insult.”

“Ordinary men don’t do what he does.”

“Please.”

“He goes in there every morning with no idea of what he’s going to find, Hans. He never knows if any of it will pay off. For him or for us.” She shook her head. “For you and Paulie, I’m talking about.”

Out on the dock, he pulled the rug back up onto the boards, rolled it, and began pressing out the water.

“That’s why he swung a crowbar at you?”

“He was mortified about that.”

“ Mortified? And how about the stuff he said to Paulie?”

“You’re right — that was inexcusable.” She turned her head and looked with a pained face out at the water. “But he wasn’t in a normal state. He really wasn’t.” Then she added, “One day, you’ll understand.”

“What, when I’m a mathematician?”

“When you have a family.”

He rose then and lugged the sopping mass up the dock. When he reached the stairs, he unrolled it and hefted it over the railing. He looked up at the porch then, miming the weight. Then he actually waved.

Mom waved back.

“He’s acting like nothing happened,” I said.

“No, he’s not. He’s acting like something dreadfully wrong happened. I’m the one who’s acting like nothing happened.”

Dad smiled a little, came down the steps, and started making his way through the woods toward the shed. We watched him. After a time, she said, “You know, Hans, human beings will always be tested.”

“Is that why you’re pretending it didn’t happen?”

She looked out at the water again, then back at me. From far in the trees, we heard the shed door slap shut. “No,” she said.

“Then why are you doing it?”

“Because I don’t see that I have any choice,” she said.

—

IN HIS SHED, the box that held his Fields Medal was sitting at the corner of his desk. He’d called me out there to speak with him.

“You know,” he said suddenly, “you can’t make time run backwards.”

“Does it look like I’m trying to?”

He actually laughed.

Then he reached into the drawer. “Now we’re going to stop bullshitting each other,” he said. “Things are about to change around here.”

He pulled out his hand. In it were a half dozen of my pills.

“Oh,” I said. “Well.”

He balled his fist and shook it. “They’re a drug, aren’t they?”

“I have no idea.”

He looked at me with disgust.

“You’ve never seen them before, right?”

“As a matter of fact, I haven’t.”

He opened the drawer and threw them back in. Then he stood and stepped toward me, leaning close. He gazed into my pupils. I could see the tiny scabs at the corners of his lips and the web of capillaries on his nose. But there was no recognition at all in the sorrowful irises that stood just a few inches from mine. Not any that I could see, anyway, even with my dose at its peak.

“You’re high on them right now,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

“I don’t even know what they are.”

His laugh was a bark. He shifted back on his heels and for a few moments just stood there. Then he sat again and began rocking in the chair, its wheels squeaking. “Well, that’s funny,” he said. “Because I found them in your closet.”

“That is funny.”

“Let’s see”—he glanced at the calendar—“about three weeks ago now.”

“Well, I don’t know what to say.”

“How about nothing?”

“That sounds good.”

He stared at me for a long time. Finally, he pointed up at the rafters. “Take a look,” he said.

I followed his finger.

“Take a look, Hans.” He leaned sideways and pushed a crate against the wall. “Go ahead. Take a glance at the work I’ve been doing.”

He tapped on the crate.

When I stepped up onto it, I was staring into his rows of boxes lined up along the rafters. The ones in front of me were all labeled WRONG or ??. Behind them, I could see a corner of one that said RIGHT.

“What do you want me to look at?”

“Just take one of them down.”

I suppose I should have known merely from being his son, not to mention from the way he’d been acting lately, or even from the sound the cardboard made as my arms bumped against it on the ledge; but my thoughts were no longer tying themselves together. I reached and pulled a box to the edge, then guided it down. Only when it was on the rug did I understand that I’d picked the one that said RIGHT.

Despite everything, I was still as hopeful as my mother.

“Go ahead,” he said.

“What?”

“Open it.”

I did.

Inside were bottles. Empty ones.

For a moment, even then, I failed to understand.

He brushed his hand toward the rafters. “Every fucking one of them,” he said.

He’d wadded paper between them, but I could still see the red wax melted on the necks. I pulled one out. Not a drop left inside.

“Birds of a feather,” he said.

“You didn’t quit.”

“What does it look like?”

“Like you didn’t.”

“Well, I did, actually. But I couldn’t make it stick.”

I sat down on the floor.